The Policy Farm Team

Nick Hillman
Indiana University 

With college costs rising, income gaps widening, and educational opportunities flagging, politicians are constantly trying to come up with “new” ways to fix education. Unfortunately, some of these “new” ideas are really just old recycled policies that have failed time and time again in the past. Case in point – Pell Grant for Kids. In President Bush’s State of the Union address (and in his dead on arrival FY2009 budget), he laid out a bold “new” plan that would commit $300 million to low-income students attending failing K-12 schools.  

In a nutshell, this plan would provide vouchers to help low-income students attending failing schools to enroll in “successful” schools of their choice. This would be an easy foot in the door of creating a nation-wide voucher system that could privatize K-12 education, and take the “public” out of “public education.” At the same time, it would legitimize school segregation based on class, income, and race. We could potentially see an even greater chasm between the have’s and the have not’s if we allow our entire educational system to be run by vouchers.

But my point here is that this plan is not so new — it’s been proposed for years and has never had the political momentum behind it to get any support. The irony is that this program will, yet again, fail to muster the political momentum needed to get it up and running simply because it was introduced by a lame-duck President. Our educational leaders in DC need to start coming up with some better solutions and quit taking the easy way out — recycling old ideas that are so clearly rooted in political ideology is a political strategy that needs to get thrown in the dump.

An alternative plan might set up federally-funded savings accounts for low-incomes students so that they will have the resources they need to pay for college when they are ready. I know not every student wants to go to college, but they should at least have it as an option! That $300 million sure would be good seed money for a college savings account program that would help poor kids financially prepare for college, wouldn’t it?

Senator Caliborne Pell, who the Pell Grant is named after, was a champion for social justice, educational opportunity, and his only political mission was to fight for the poor. He had a vision of what educational access could mean for poor students who wanted a shot at college, and with some resistance he was able to create the nation’s only need-based scholarship program for low-income college students. He didn’t try to sneak in other political goals in the Pell Grant program, it was clearly a fight for social justice. Pell Grants for Kids is a wolf in sheeps clothing, as it would unlock the floodgate of educational privatization.